I started out as a Teutono-sceptic. How could it be otherwise? You grow up reading Commando comics, you watch Hogan’s Heroes — which makes a clunkingly unfunny distinction between Bad Germans and Stupid Germans — you snigger perhaps at ‘Allo ‘Allo. At school an eccentric German teacher tries to correct the balance with Beethoven and Willy Brandt, but in the end my generation is still held hostage by the inbuilt hostility of our fathers who last glimpsed Germany at 17,000ft through the bomb-sights of a Lancaster. One of my predecessors in the Times office in Germany was Frank Johnson (who